In this article

Visualizing data from Azure Monitor

11/24/2018

3 minutes to read

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In this article

This article provides a summary of the available methods to visualize log and metric data stored in Azure Monitor.

Visualizations such as charts and graphs can help you analyze your monitoring data to drill-down on issues and identify patterns. Depending on the tool you use, you may also have the option to share visualizations with other users inside and outside of your organization.

Azure Dashboards

Azure dashboards are the primary dashboarding technology for Azure. They're particularly useful in providing single pane of glass over your Azure infrastructure and services allowing you to quickly identify important issues.

Advantages

Deep integration into Azure. Visualizations can be pinned to dashboards from multiple Azure pages including metrics analytics, log analytics, and Application Insights.

Interactive, supports multi-level drill-in (view that drills into another view)

Limitations

Supports logs but not metrics.

No personal views. Available to all users with access to the workspace.

No automatic refresh.

Limited layout options.

No support for querying across multiple workspaces or Application Insights applications.

Queries are limited in response size to 8MB and query execution time of 110 seconds.

Application Insights Workbooks

Workbooks are interactive documents that provide deep insights into your data, investigation, and collaboration inside the team. Specific examples where workbooks are useful are troubleshooting guides and incident postmortem.

Advantages

Supports both metrics and logs.

Supports parameters enabling interactive reports where selecting an element in a table will dynamically update associated charts and visualizations.

Document-like flow.

Option for personal or shared workbooks.

Easy, collaborative-friendly authoring experience.

Templates support public GitHub-based template gallery.

Limitations

No automatic refresh.

No dense layout like dashboards, which make workbooks less useful as a single pane of glass. Intended more for providing deeper insights.

Power BI

Power BI is particularly useful for creating business-centric dashboards and reports, as well as reports analyzing long-term KPI trends. You can import the results of a log query into a Power BI dataset so you can take advantage of its features such as combining data from different sources and sharing reports on the web and mobile devices.

Limitations

Query results need to be imported into Power BI model to configure. Limitation on result size and refresh.

Limited data refresh of eight times per day.

Grafana

Grafana is an open platform that excels in operational dashboards. It's particularly useful for detecting and isolating and triaging operational incidents. You can add Grafana Azure Monitor data source plugin to your Azure subscription to have it visualize your Azure metrics data.